


5 Universes In Which Jane Is Worthy and 1 Where She Isn’t

by the_irish_mayhem



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Jane Foster (Marvel), Brunnhilde | Valkyrie & Thor Friendship (Marvel), Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen, Mentions of Cancer, Natasha Romanov & Thor Friendship, Post-Endgame, outside pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-01
Updated: 2020-12-01
Packaged: 2021-03-10 02:00:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,704
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27826417
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_irish_mayhem/pseuds/the_irish_mayhem
Summary: The woman holding Mjolnir is tall, with shining armor that looks well-crafted, including a helmet that hides the upper half of her face. In spite of that, he can see her eyes.Eyes he would know anywhere in the galaxy.She looks almost as stunned as he is.“Jane?”Or: what it says on the tin.
Relationships: Jane Foster/Thor
Comments: 8
Kudos: 35





	5 Universes In Which Jane Is Worthy and 1 Where She Isn’t

**Author's Note:**

> This is a series of short, unrelated vignettes/oneshots that was supposed to be posted for Fosterson Week a year or two ago and I finally got around to finishing it.
> 
> Enjoy!

**1.**

On the top ten list of bad ideas she’s ever had, this is so, so, _so_ bad the number one spot doesn’t even seem adequate. The guy who thought he was Thor clearly got caught trying to get her stuff back, and so she is  _ so _ screwed unless she goes in herself. God, why did she go along with this again? He’d claimed he’d fly out once he got what he was looking for (which,  _ god _ , again, why had she kind of believed him?)

Her feet crunch quietly against the hard-packed sand leading to the hole in the plastic tarping making up the walls of the facility that Thor had kicked a guy through, and she, without nearly as much hesitation as she should probably feel, hops in.

The place isn’t huge, and it doesn’t take long for Jane to find the main room.

Thor had helpfully drawn nearly everyone in security away from where her equipment is stowed, next to a… hammer in the dirt. Literally, they built this entire site around a hammer? What the  _ hell _ , archaeologists never get this much funding and government attention. And what does her equipment have to do with it?

Jane shakes herself. She has a lot more important things to do instead of trying to puzzle out the weird and wild workings of shady government agencies. Things like capitalizing on their inattentiveness and getting her gear back.

She grabs her notebook first, stuffing it into her back pocket, and then trying to figure out how she’s going to cart out at least two hundred or so pounds of equipment.

“Hey!”

Jane nearly leaps out of her skin and turns, seeing a pair of security guards sprinting towards her from one of the halls.

“Shit,” she spits, and frantically looks around at her equipment. Lightest and hardest to replace… Radio spectrometer retrofitted for wormholes. Yep, that one. She scoops it up in her arms and takes off.

Even running as quickly as she can, the guards are still within arm’s length of her before she’s taken five steps.

Oh, they are not taking her work. Absolutely not. Erik isn’t here to hold her back this time.

She reaches an arm out, barely managing to hold onto her spectrometer as she grasps the handle of the hammer. Old or valuable, the thing is still a hammer, she can still swing at them with it.

A crack of thunder. A blinding flash of light. The feeling of grabbing a live-wire running through her body for a handful of terrifying seconds until the euphoria comes.

_ If she be worthy _ , she hears.

_ May she possess the power of Thor. _

Oh, Jane thinks. 

Oh,  _ fuck _ .

**2.**

“No, I don’t know what… That’s why I’m coming out here to… Look, all the issues with our readings at the site are originating from this one spot, so yeah, I’m going to go take a look,” Jane says into the phone.

“Who is it?” Darcy whispers. Their truck rumbles along a remote road in Norway leading to the coast, and the interference from their mystery site makes it so they don’t get any radio stations, so Darcy is starved for entertainment.

Jane covers the mouthpiece and whispers back, “Caplan. He’s--” she uncovers the mouthpiece. “No, there’s not any danger. You--no… No… Wait, but that time wasn’t actually my fault, so…”

“Being a dick again?”

Jane’s eyeroll is all the answer required. “Look, we’ll be ba-- in--” Jane makes an almost comical crackling noise in the back of her throat. “Wha-- interference from the-- thr-- breaking up--bye.” She hangs up without any further discussion.

Darcy contains a laugh. “You’re gonna pay for that later, you know.”

Jane rolls her eyes again. “Well, it’s my being at his facility that’s even getting him funding in the first place, so, you know.” She shrugs. “If he wants to fight me, I’m the one with more published papers and theories that changed the laws of physics.”

Darcy pumps a fist. “Fuck yeah.”

She waves a hand. “He’ll be fine. He’s pissed we took the Mule without asking.” Where they plan on going, there’s no vehicle access, so the ATV was their only recourse. “If he thinks I’ll be satisfied with this one spot fucking up my results over and over again, he’s got another thing coming. Speaking of which,” the device that rests in Jane’s lap begins to ping, “pull over here.”

“Woo, off-road time,” Darcy cheers, and follows Jane’s instructions.

Another hour of driving in the Mule later, they reach the geographic nexus that’s been screwing with their readings.

It’s a pretty spot, bright green grass running all the way to the edge of the cliff, where a sheer drop would land them in the ocean. Norway’s fjords are always breathtaking, and Darcy counts herself lucky yet again that she gets to visit places like this and get paid for it. All in all, a pretty rad job.

“Can you set up--”

“Magnetic perimeter and radiation scanners?” Darcy finishes. “Yeah.”

Darcy unloads the equipment from the back of the ATV as Jane approaches the nexus.

It looks like a storm is beginning to swirl overhead, and Darcy eyes it nervously. Without any cover, they are pretty much sitting ducks if any rain starts to fall, god forbid if lightning starts. Where the hell did all these thunderheads come from? This blew in awfully fast.

Jane crouches down and reaches for something on the ground. “Darcy, you should come look at this,” she calls out. 

Quite suddenly, the hair on the back of Darcy’s neck stands straight up. The sensation is so strong and sudden that it literally causes her to gasp in shock.

“Jane--” she starts but she doesn’t get the chance to finish.

Faster than the blink of an eye, a massive bolt of lightning tears from the sky, slicing straight down to where Jane kneels.

Darcy barely has time to scream.

She is thrown backwards by the force of the lightning strike, and she thinks she hears a voice whisper before she hits the ground behind her.

_ If she be worthy. _

When she looks up again, she knows she hears it.

A strange woman stands where Jane once was--massive, tall, blonde, with impressive armor and Mjolnir in her fist.

_ May she possess the power of Thor. _

**3.**

Fragile isn’t a word that could ever have been used to describe Jane Foster, but with her cheekbones hollowed out by weight loss, neck and wrists gone skinny and tendons standing out against her skin in sharp relief, fragile almost seems generous. A plastic band wraps around her wrist, stamped with her name, attending physician, allergies, and a barcode encoded with all her patient information.

She is tired, often, but with Darcy’s help still manages to go through her research and rough out an outline for her next paper she plans to publish.

Jane likes to plan, likes to say things like there’s a conference next September that this paper will do really well at, and Jane knows that Darcy is trying to hide her heartbreak at these statements. Darcy used to not hide anything from her, used to barely have the capacity, let alone the desire, but it’s strange the effect dying can have.

Her hospital room is outfitted with several whiteboards scribbled over with notes and formulae, the answers Jane constantly seeks waiting to be pried out of the clutches of the equations she can spend hours puzzling over. It’s a good use of her time, when she’s not--

Elsewhere.

Jane is careful to hide the hammer. It’s her secret legacy, her last hurrah, her hidden responsibility and duty--

Mjolnir is many things to her, but burdensome is certainly not one of them.

She swings her legs over the side of her bed, gripping her IV pole to help her stand. She walks over to the window, where the sunlight of the early afternoon has been shrouded over by storm clouds. She slides open her window, the cool wind of the storm washing over her face.

In the distance, she hears the rumble of thunder.

Jane Foster smiles.

**4.**

His axe is buried in Thanos’s chest, and there’s a blinding moment of what feels like sour vengeance--so many have died already, and now the Mad Titan will perish for his crimes.

He presses the blade of Stormbreaker in further, for Loki, for Heimdall, for every one of his slaughtered people.

Then Thanos whispers, “You should’ve gone for the head.”

And he feels his heart drop.

And then, and suddenly as Thor himself had dropped from the sky, another streak of lightning blazes in from the east, and Thor can feel it--  _ Mjolnir _ .

But how?

He can’t even tell who is wielding it until the hammer smashes Thanos’s skull in, and the Mad Titan is finally felled. The Infinity Gauntlet drops, the stones unused, the universe saved.

The woman holding Mjolnir is tall, with shining armor that looks well-crafted, including a helmet that hides the upper half of her face. In spite of that, he can see her eyes.

Eyes he would know anywhere in the galaxy.

She looks almost as stunned as he is.

“Jane?”

**5.**

The cell phone footage is grainy and difficult to make out. Shot by a civilian in Garching, Germany, the shaky video peeks at the action from behind a brick wall. A voice out of frame whispers,  _ “Dude, I think it’s Thor!”  _ and is quickly hushed by the one holding the camera.  _ So at least two more witnesses to track down, _ Natasha thinks tiredly.

The observation, though, is rather striking in its accuracy. The figure has a red cape and flowing blonde hair, and displays a command of lightning that Natasha hasn’t seen since Thor more-or-less retired after their last showdown with Thanos.

The opponents are a small gaggle of aliens, impossible to fully make out but probably more scavengers who’d come to pick the bones of Thanos’s last battlefield. In the two years since the Snap, they’d been getting a steadier stream of extraterrestrial threats looking to take advantage of Earth’s vulnerability.

“How is it that we have holographic video technology widely available, but every civilian who has useful intel has a Nokia from 2004?” Natasha grumbles, squinting and trying again in vain to enhance the footage.

From her place next to her, Okoye chuckles. “I think we’ve demonstrated that we have the worst luck imaginable,” she jokes darkly.

The figure is still hard to make out aside from the gaudy cape and lightning. The electricity in the air made the audio on the video spotty at best, mostly static and a few loud bursts of accurate recordings of a fight, but mostly useless. Then a few video frames give them a clear view of the front of the figure.

“Pause,” Natasha says, sitting forward in her chair. “Go back three frames?” The computer obeys her voice command, ticking back to the moment when they had the best view.

Both Okoye and Natasha freeze as they take in the image.

There’s a shard of disappointment that goes through Natasha when she realizes, once and for all, that it definitely isn’t Thor. That disappointment turns swiftly into suspicion because she does not know this person, and they certainly have powers that would’ve landed them at the top of a SHIELD watchlist back in the day.

It’s a woman. She’s massive, arms and legs thick with muscle, and extensive armor that could be Asgardian make, but with the graininess of the video, it’s hard to tell. Her helmet covers almost her entire face, only exposing her mouth and jaw. Some sort of chainmail on her legs, perhaps, and a sleeve on her left arm. Her right arm is bare, and clutched in that hand--

“Mjolnir,” Natasha breathes.

“I thought it was destroyed,” Okoye says.

Natasha nods. “We all did.”

Despite the video quality, there’s no mistaking that hammer. Especially when Natasha resumes the video and the mysterious woman throws the hammer, and it returns to her hand moments later.

“We haven’t seen any new powered people since the Snap,” Okoye says, breaking the silence. “With our…  _ situation _ being what it is,” she continues, tactfully calling the mess they’d made of the world a  _ situation _ , “we should either ascertain if this woman is on our side, get her on our side, or terminate her as soon as possible.”

Natasha nods in quiet contemplation. They cannot afford to have a powered person running around the world unchecked, not with the way things are. They’re barely managing to hold it together as it is, and the Avengers are spread extremely thin. Not to mention their help is often rejected in an official capacity, a lionshare of the blame for what happened falling to the World’s Greatest Heroes who failed to save the world. It’s a PR nightmare, and there are many nights when Natasha wishes that she’d just been dusted along with the half of the world who didn’t make it.

But she didn’t. She’s still here, and someone needs to lead.

“Want me to track down Thor and ask him about her?” Okoye says. “Based on her strength from that video, she’s probably Asgardian.”

Natasha’s kneejerk reaction is to say no, that Thor can’t handle this, that he’s been in an almost constant state of inebriation and/or depression for the last two years and she won’t expose her friend to something that might be painful for him. Then her rational mind kicks in and she nods at Okoye. Thor is their best lead. “I’ll come with you.” (Then her vicious mind raises its hackles and says if she’s got to wade into the shit that is the post-Snap world, then Thor should have to get right into it with her.)

That night, the evening news features a story with the grainy footage Natasha could’ve sworn she’d managed to scrub from everywhere (but alas, she is no Vision.) The ticker at the bottom of the screen reads  _ The New Thor: Who is she, and can we trust her? _

* * *

They find him at a hightop table in a hole-in-the-wall bar in New Asgard, and if Natasha had been serving him, she probably would’ve cut him off at least four drinks ago, but the bartender doesn’t seem concerned with denying their monarch his alcoholic solace.

“Do I need to go get Brunnhilde?” Okoye whispers to Natasha.

Thor sways in his barstool, hands clasped around a large stein of beer, but seems coherent enough to answer their questions.

“Not yet.”

“Wha--?” Thor mumbles, eyes half-lidded. “What’re you saying?” His words are disturbingly slurred. Maybe getting Brunnhilde wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Natasha refocuses. “Have you watched the news recently?”

Thor snorts and takes a drink of beer. And doesn’t stop taking a drink of beer until the stein is half-empty. Natasha’s eyes widen when he lets out a loud belch.

“Apologies,” he says, not sounding apologetic, “but you’ll have to excuse me for not keeping up with current events.”

Okoye cuts in, “How about this current event?

She slides a set of photos out of a manila envelope, laying them down on the bar table. The paper sticks to the surface of the table.

Thor shakes his head once, as if trying to rein in the spinning the room is likely doing around him. He leans down and squints at the photos. “That--” He cocks his head. “That isn’t me.”

“No,” Okoye confirms. “It isn’t.”

“These photos were taken two days ago in Garching, Germany. Know of any Asgardians who settled there?”

Thor swallows, and doesn’t immediately answer. He raises his free hand not on his beer to the photos, and the tip of his middle finger drags over where Mjolnir is inked onto the paper. “I thought it was gone,” he mumbles.

“So did we,” Natasha says, tempted to reach out to him at the abject sadness in his voice.

Okoye slants a glance at Natasha.  _ Focus _ , she seems to say with her eyes, before redirecting Thor, “Are there any Asgardians in Germany?”

“A few,” he says. “None that look like this woman.” He looks up at them. “Do you know how she found Mjolnir?”

It’s his most coherent question yet. Natasha shakes her head. “We just found out about her. She looks pretty confident with it, so maybe she’s been training somewhere.”

“I don’t underst--” Thor loses his battle with his balance and gravity and falls off his barstool. Natasha and Okoye both reach out to steady him, but he manages to catch himself before he hits the floor.

Natasha goes to Thor’s side, her heart falling quickly as she puts an arm around him. It’s hard to see Thor like this, especially knowing the kind of man he used to be. (Of all the people she thought would stick with her, after Clint and Steve left, she thought that Thor would be the one to stay. He’d fought through so much heartache, sided with them in New York against his own brother, protected the Earth from the Dark Elves after his mother’s murder, faced down Thanos even after his planet had been destroyed, and yet he’d always been ready to fight. It’s downright unnatural, utterly tragic to see him laid so low.)

Turning to Okoye, Natasha says, “Go get Brunnhilde.” Okoye doesn’t need to be told twice.

“Thor,” Natasha prompts, getting the man to look at her. His eyes look pained. She’s sure hers must reflect his. “You’ve gotta stop this.”

“Stop what?” he mumbles.

“You know what.” She hesitates before offering, “You could come back, you know. Join the Avengers again. I really could use the help, and you’ve got more experience leading than everyone else on the team combined.”

He’s already shaking his head. “No.” Clear, concise, and completely at odds with his drunkenness. “No, I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

His answering smile is sad. “I have nothing left to offer you.”

“Yes, you do,” Natasha answers softly, but based on his tone, this isn’t an argument she’s going to win. Not today, at least.

A beat passes. “You really didn’t know about Mjolnir?” she asks, one more time.

“I’m not worthy anymore,” he whispers. “Why would it call to me?”

Natasha doesn’t answer that. There’s a lot of layers there that she doesn’t think she’ll ever fully understand.

Okoye returns with Brunnhilde at her side. She says to Okoye, “You know, sometime you’re going to have to visit me when it’s not for the purposes of picking his sorry ass up off the floor.”

Okoye chuckles. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

Brunnhilde proceeds to pick Thor up in a bridal carry, making Natasha stumble a bit when his weight is no longer against her. “Come on, your majesty,” she says, tone almost bored. “Let’s get you home.”

Natasha bites her tongue against all the questions she wants to ask.

_ How often do you do this for him? _

_ How is everyone around here blind to what’s happening to him? _

_ Where on earth is he getting enough alcohol to regularly get drunk? _

Before she can even think of pursuing another line of questioning, she gets a call from Carol--she is needed urgently back at headquarters.

She sighs. The hunt for the new Thor will have to wait for now.

* * *

It’s only once Natasha and Okoye are on a quinjet and flying back to their base that Brunnhilde unceremoniously drops Thor on the ground.

He huffs, but quickly stands up and brushes himself off, perfectly sober. “Unnecessary.”

She glares at him. “How long are you going to keep this act up?” she demands. “Those are your  _ friends _ .”

“Natasha is a friend,” Thor corrects, “Okoye thinks I’m a worthless drunk.”

Brunnhilde rolls her eyes. “Because she’s never known you as anything else.”

He grits his teeth. “It’s for the best.”

“That’s what you keep telling yourself, but they  _ know _ about her. What’s your act doing to keep her safe now?”

The muscle in Thor’s jaw works furiously, but he calmly answers, “They don’t know her identity. They think she’s a rogue Asgardian.”

Brunnhilde bristles and brusquely pulls a folded manila envelope out of her back pocket. “Okoye gave these to me, said to ask you about them again when you sobered up.” She quickly opens the envelope and tears its contents out and holds them right in his face. The edges of the photo paper crease under the force of her fingers clenching down on them. “You see this? The better she gets, the more this is going to happen. And you know what’s eventually going to happen?” She jerks her head backwards. “Your friends are going to find her. She’s on a crash course, and then she will be a part of this. You can’t stop that. It was a fantasy to think you ever could.”

“I didn’t think I could keep her from it forever,” Thor replies evenly, and he wraps his fingers around Brunnhilde’s wrist and lowers the photos from his face so he can look her in the eye.

“Then  _ why _ ?” she asks.

“Because she needs to be better than me,” he says, like a release of steam from a pot. “She needs to be better, and she’s not yet.”

Brunnhilde shakes her head. “I don’t know if you’re going to get a choice for much longer.

**and the one time…**

“Jane.”

His shoulder jumps under her head.

“Hm?”

“We’re almost there.”

“Oh,” she says groggily, and pushes herself off Thor’s shoulder. “Oops,” she says when she notices the spot of drool on his shirt. “Sorry.” The weird half-sleep that comes along with car rides is slow to depart, clawing at her eyelids until she reaches to her right, where a bottle of water sits.

After she downs half the bottle and truly wakes up, he gives her a soft smile, one that says he probably wasn’t far behind her in terms of falling asleep. “It’s no matter. I thought you’d want to be awake before we arrived.”

She stretches her hands over her head as much as the towncar’s roof allows, and a series of satisfying pops go down her spine. She grunts in satisfaction before saying, “I need to go over my speech one more time.”

“I’m fairly certain  _ I _ could give it at this point with how many times I’ve heard it.”

“You’re a good person to practice with!”

“I’m only teasing,” he says. “And besides, this is hardly your first time doing this.”

“This still feels bigger, somehow.” 

He makes a soft sound of agreement. Jane offers the water to him, which he accepts and drinks his fill before capping it and setting it aside.

Jane continues, “It’s one thing to get, you know, a big science award. Like, the last time I got the Nobel I felt almost old hat at it, you know?”

Thor gives her a look. “I recall you saying that you felt like you were going to throw up before you went onstage to give your speech.”

Jane flaps her hand at him. “Okay, sure I was nervous, but I was….used to the shape of it? This is a completely different type of thing.”

“Yes, excelling at heroics is something you usually leave to me.”

“Hey, I have plenty of behind the scenes heroics!”

“Of course, dear,” he says with a laugh, “but none of those behind the scenes heroics resulted in a singlehanded defeat of the Infinity Stones, handicapping Thanos’s plan, and saving untold lives.”

Jane tilts her head back onto the headrest, a smile spreading across her face. That day, that last fight that Strange predicted would end in only one way, would be permanently emblazoned in her memory as long as she lived. Thor had asked her to stay away from the battlefield, and initially, she’d agreed. She and Tony had been theorizing about the nature of the stones, and they hadn’t had time to parse out the quantum entanglement theories together before her thinking buddy had to jet off to try and save the universe.

It came to her like a lightning strike only minutes after the team had left for the last battle. She’d built a frequency jammer that would disrupt the quantum entanglement of the stones in thirty minutes flat, and then raced out of the Avengers compound like a bat out of hell. She’d just have to get within range of the stones, and they’d be rendered inert, their effects immediately reversed, and they’d just be ordinary stones, and then they could be destroyed.

And, incredibly, even though the science of it was shaky at best, and she’d had to improvise on the fly when some of the wiring on the jammer had shorted out, it worked.

The army from the past was gone, snapped back to their original chronological configuration; Natasha and Gamora were spat out of whatever pocket universe they’d been trapped in; and Tony hadn’t had to use his gauntlet, hadn’t had to sacrifice himself for the universe as she’d  _ known _ he’d planned on.

(Dr. Strange had sputtered, shocked, saying that of the fourteen million six hundred and five futures he’d seen, he’d only seen one possible outcome where they won, and it wasn’t this.

Jane shrugged, breathless, dirty, bloody, and grinned. “I found number fourteen million six hundred and  _ six _ .”)

“And all without a single power to her name aside from her intellect,” he finishes.

“I am pretty cool.”

“Both pretty and cool, much agreed.”

She lets her head fall to the side so she can look at him. His beard is long enough to be braided, and he’d done so this morning, and he’d taken care to braid some of his hair as well before pulling it back with a tie. He looked good. Great. Amazing, even.

She reached out her hand closest to him, trailing a finger along one of the braids in his beard. A streetlight from outside catches on her wedding ring just so.

After the Snap, she and Thor had drifted back together, partially out of shared grief and guilt, but had ultimately rediscovered why they’d worked together for years before the distance had become too much strain. They’d officially tied the knot a few years after Tony and Pepper had. (Steve had been Thor’s best man, and Darcy Jane’s maid of honor. Tony walked Jane down the aisle in Jane’s mother’s absence. Morgan had been their flower girl.) 

She wonders if any of this would’ve happened if they hadn’t found each other again. If they hadn’t rekindled their love for each other in the horrible aftermath of the Snap, would she have been around to help? Would Tony have reached out to her with the time travel issue? Would he have invited her to collaborate on the quantum entanglement of the stones if she hadn’t re-integrated herself into the Avengers circle? She likes to think so--they were friends, at least somewhat, before the Snap (but their closeness now was only formed in those last five years of wounded peace.)

“What are you thinking about?” Thor asks, and mirrors her position so he can look at her.

“Just that I’m really glad I married you.” She nudges forward so she can kiss him. “Really, really glad.”

“I’m glad you married me, too,” he answers. “Not many women would have had the fortitude to put up with me for as long as you have.”

She grabs his hand and pulls it over to her lap. “How many people did Pepper say were going to be here?”

Thor shrugs. “Less than two thousand, but there is the webcast as well.”

“ _ God _ .”

He squeezes her hand. “Go through your speech once more. It’ll make you feel better.”

“I’d feel better if we could skip past the ceremony and go right to the drinking and partying portion of the evening.”

Thor laughed. “If only I were planning the evening, Jane Foster. Now start from the top.”

Jane laughs, and closes her eyes. With her husband’s hand in hers, his warmth a steady reassurance at her side, she recalls the words she’s memorized and feels her nervousness retreat as she begins to speak.


End file.
